You bring yourself with you
Currently about an hour into a 2.5 hour plane ride from Kuala Lumpur back to Da Nang, trying to turn the last month of my life into something legible to share here.
This is more or less what I imagine Field Notes being: a place to dump thoughts, stories from the road, photographs, songs, things I felt were worthy of sharing but maybe didn't have the right platform to share them on.
I keep a journal, but I'm terrible at going back and reading it. So once a month I'm going to force myself to do exactly that, pull out whatever seems worth sharing, and send it your way.
A task made no easier by the lady sitting next to me, who has either forgotten her headphones or decided that I am also interested in her TikTok feed.
August update
- traveled to Malaysia and tried some of the strangest cuisine
- parted ways with my partner of 3.5 years
- had the worst trading week of my life (but we bounce back)
- hiked 16km up Monkey Mountain in hopes of sighting a red-shanked douc (rare monkey)
Malaysia
I spent a couple weeks here, my first time in the country.
It's a beautiful, wildly diverse place. The vintage scene was great. Hokkien Mee:
crazy views. this was in the pool of my apartment
It was also one of the most difficult two weeks I've been through yet.
My partner and I parted ways after 3.5 years together. Communication issues, built-up resentment over the years, and areas where we both need to improve as people.
There's obviously a lot more to that story than I want to unpack here, but there is one thing in particular that I've been thinking a lot about since the breakup:
Moving to a new country doesn't fix relationship problems. Neither does moving to a new apartment, making more money, or convincing yourself that the next chapter will somehow make all the issues from the last one disappear.
You bring yourself with you.
Not exactly sure why I'm sharing this. It's just been a big realization this month. Maybe one of you is going through something similar and this can help.
couple more from Malaysia:
Music as memory
I put out a post you might think is cool on Instagram this month about music and memory. Naturally, after a relationship ends, I've been listening to a lot of music to help process everything.
I've always been that friend people look to when we're out and a song comes on and no one knows the name of it. Like a human Shazam.
Music plays a huge role in my life. Not only listening to it, but playing it too. I actually just got a beater guitar over here because I realized my life is genuinely worse without it.
But the crazy thing about music is what happens when you hear a song you've attached to a memory.
Suddenly you're back there in that moment
Maybe it's a song you heard for the first time on a road trip with friends, or something that was playing during a particular night out at 2am
Sometimes I hear a song and remember something I genuinely don't think I could have pulled out of my head otherwise
I did a little digging and apparently there's a real phenomenon behind this called the reminiscence bump / music-evoked autobiographical memory .
Apparently music is particularly good at triggering autobiographical memories because it engages multiple areas of the brain at once.
Seems pretty fucking cool to me.
Listen to more music. It's one of the closest things we've got to a time machine.
Performance
One more thought, just been on my mind lately.
How much of life is actually lived for ourselves, and how much is performed for other people?
I see it all over the internet, and I see myself sliding in that direction occasionally.
Just the other day I took my guitar to this little park to play and people watch. About 10 minutes into playing, I caught myself thinking:
This would make a really cool post. I bet some people would really resonate with this.
And it probably would have.
But the second I'm thinking about how the experience will look to someone else, I'm no longer completely inside the experience itself.
I'm performing it.
I don't think there's anything wrong with taking photographs of your life or sharing the things you're doing. That's basically what I'm doing here. I just think there's a line somewhere between documenting your life and living your life for the documentation.
I've been trying to pay more attention to that line lately.
It's pretty easy to build something that looks like a great life from the outside. The right places, the right clothes, the right hobbies, the right photographs.
I've said it before on Instagram, but I think authenticity is one of the most attractive qualities a person can have.
Because if your happiness or sense of self depends on other people's opinions of you, what happens when those opinions change?
Just look at Will Smith lol.
This guy puts it better than I could:
A few things I've been into lately
- Tokyo Express — never been a big mystery guy, but picked this up in KL and really enjoyed. it is credited as having launched the mystery genre in Japan in the 60s
- this guys apartment is cool as hell. Dream apartment, but not LA. Think Amsterdam or Tokyo.
- actual life 3 — this album on repeat as I speed through the streets of Da Nang dodging scooters on my road bike
- Sin Sze Si Ya Temple— if you're in KL, this temple in Chinatown is worth a visit
- chinese hot pot — soo spicy. Just get medium, trust me.
What's next?
Vietnam holds a lot of memories for me right now. Some good and some bad.
I've always said that if I had to live in the US it would be in the PNW. Something about the idea of life in a cabin, playing guitar on the porch, hiking to waterfalls, and walking the rocky coast just speaks to me.
Anyone want to rent a place out there and shoot some photos this fall?
also, if you know a good medium format camera that's not crazy expensive DM me on Instagram 🫶🏻